Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Introduction

The newest motherboard from Transcend, the TS-AVE3, is based upon the Via Apollo Pro133A chipset from which it offers all the functionalities. The TS-AVE3 is a flexible board, which comes with support for ATA66, 4X AGP, and PC133 memory, among other features. Since it is a Socket 370 board, it can also support a wide array of processors, from the Intel Celeron, to the newest Pentium Coppermine FC-PGA, and even Socket 370 CPUs from Cyrix. With all that in mind, let's take a good long look at the board.

The features

The TS-AVE3 is expandable via its 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, 1 AGP port, and AMR slot. It also features 3 168-pin DIMM slots, and can support upto 1,5 GB of SDRAM PC-100/PC-133 or VCM.

To configure the TS-AVE3, most of the work will be performed within the BIOS. A sole set of jumpers does exist, however, to either force the system bus to work at a given speed, while it sets the range of Overclocking frequencies. Adjustment of the FSB frequency is performed from within the BIOS, but is intimately linked with the setting of the previously mentioned jumpers. 4 jumper settings are thus available to users: Auto, 66MHz, 100MHz, and 133MHz. By selecting 100MHz, it will be possible to choose a frequency of between 100MHz, and 124MHz, whereas by selecting 133MHz, frequencies of upto 160MHz become available. Do note, however, that the BIOS will continually try (probably by automatic processor detection) to prevent the FSB from being clocked above a certain frequency. For instance, though we chose a setting of 133MHz on the jumper, we were unable to obtain an Overclocking frequency of 133MHz. In fact, we were unable to get anything above 124MHz. This is rather annoying, as the PIII 500E FCPGA that we used for these tests is regularly able to reach 667MHz in concert with other boards clocked to 133MHz of FSB... Finally, an integrated BIOS function permits the memory bus frequency to be set 33MHz higher or lower than that of the FSB.

Next: Additional features.